Dara HornThe author of three books and the mother of three young children talked with great energy and enthusiasm about her life and work, particularly her recent novel, "All Other Nights." It's set during the Civil War and features a few figures from history, including Judah Benjamin, who was secretary of state of the Confederacy.

Benjamin is a fascinating character, and Horn knows a lot about him. He was born a British subject in the West Indies, enrolled in Yale Law School when he was 14, was the second Jewish man to serve in the U.S. Senate, was a spymaster for the Confederacy and ...

"He was on the Confederate $2 bill," Horn said, pulling out a well-thumbed copy of "All Other Nights." Stuck in the book was a Confederate $2 bill, in a clear plastic sleeve, with Benjamin's picture on it. Her husband found it on eBay and gave it to her as a Mother's Day present, and she brings it to events and passes it around. The bill only had printing on one side, but Horn said it was authentic and pointed out that it could only be redeemed if the South won the war.

"He was a pragmatist," she said, "and he was hated by everyone because anti-Semitism was so open back then. People would say the vilest things to him and he never responded. He would always just smile. Everyone commented on his smile. It was a mask, a price he had to pay."

Horn's first two novels, "In the Image" and "The World to Come," were nonlinear and played with time. "All Other Nights" is more of "a 19th-century dime novel," she said. "There are plot twists. There's a shootout at a wedding."

There are codes and ciphers. Both sides in the Civil War used secret codes, and Horn got into it and incorporated them in her book. She provided examples in the reading group guide to "All Other Nights" and explained how the South's alphabet substitution system might seem harder to crack than the North's routing columns but was actually easier, once you figured it out. While flipping through the book, she pointed out an error in one of the examples. It's a little thing, but it still bothers her.

"All Other Nights" might be a spy novel and a romance novel all in one book, but there are serious themes running through it. Horn likes to bring ancient religious sources into her novels and the story of Jacob the Patriarch from the Book of Genesis is embedded in "All Other Nights." The main character is named Jacob and the novel pivots on the question of whether people can change and whether that's possible or desirable.

Horn, who wrote her Harvard thesis on "Morals of the Story in Hebrew and Yiddish Literature," said not too many people pick up on the Jacob the Patriarch stuff.

"There are a lot of pastors who notice," she said. "It is subtle. It's in there glancingly."